Dealing with Doctors, Denial, and Death A Guide to Living Well with Serious Illness

Aroop Mangalik has just published Dealing with Doctors, Denial, and Death A Guide to Living Well with Serious Illness with Rowman & Littlefield.

PrefaceIntroduction1: Dealing with the Inevitability of Death2: Communication, Hope and Honesty3: Religion, Healing and Death4: Patient Autonomy and Medical Expertise: How to Find a Balance5: Planning for Your Life, Illness and Death6: Do No Harm7: Statistics: They Help and They Fool8: Why Doctors Over-Treat: Training and Mindset9: Why Doctors Over-Treat: Pressure from Society and the Medical Establishment10: Why Doctors Over-Treat: Flaws in the Way They Deal with Patients11: When Doctors Say “No”12: Why Patients Demand Unrealistic Treatments13: How to Reduce Over-Treatment14: How to Proceed toward Comfort

Often when death is the inevitable and impending outcome of a health diagnosis, doctors are reluctant to discuss alternatives to treatment, feeding into a culture of denial that can result in expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary over treatment that may or may not extend life but almost always damages the quality of life.

Here, a seasoned doctor and researcher looks at the ways in which we are accustomed to treating illness at all costs, even at the expense of the quality of a patient’s life. He considers our culture of denial, the medical profession’s role in over treating patients and end of life care, and the patient’s options and role in these decisions. The goal is to help patients and families make informed decisions that may help the seriously ill live better with their illnesses.

This profoundly empowering book will help people make informed decisions about their lives and medical care, especially those who have a life-threatening or life-changing illness themselves or have a family member living with one.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.